The Shattered Horizon

It began with the geomancers of Ehyang. One thousand years ago, though its very name did not inspire terror as it does now, Ehyang was already a mighty empire, having conquered the lands of the Voldrukun and the Shaipuur. The most prominent arcanists of Ehyang were the geomancers, servants of the imperial court who tapped into the energy of ley lines to fuel powerful magic, invisible conduits of arcane energy that spread across the world like a spider’s web. The geomancers mapped out the paths of the ley lines with exacting precision, and the armies of Ehyang followed these paths to conquest.

The geomancers had long known that where two ley lines met, the arcane energy was greatly multiplied, but it was during the time of the emperor Shi-Tyow that they proposed a great expedition to discover the answer to a long-standing mystery: What happened when the ley lines met the cosmos at the edge of the world?

The emperor was intrigued. He dedicated ten legions to the expedition, and so set forth the geomancers of Ehyang with a thousand cannons and ten-thousand riflemen. For eight years they marched toward the edge of the world, which few men had ever seen, conquering or eradicating the local peoples as they went. Behind them followed a league of engineers and workmen, building a great road that would stretch from the emperor’s palace to the very end of the world.

As the ninth year began, the expedition reached the edge of the world, though the stars seemed no closer than they do in the sky. The land ended, falling away into blackness, the rocky face like a cliff into murky infinity. Though they had followed the ley line, there was no sign of the stream of energy flowing away from the world. There was, however, a faint glow over the edge.

So when the engineers completed the road, they set about the task of constructing a rig to allow the arcanists to go over the edge of the world and find the source of the glow. That was how the geomancers first discovered the ley crystals, the mineral veins coursing with unimaginable energy. That was how Ehyang came to mine the edge of the world.